French-American singer-songwriter Barbara Forstner draws from a meeting point between indie rock and classic folk songwriting, creating songs that are raw and deeply attentive to the complexities of being human. Her writing is rooted in observation: of herself, of other people, of the strange and often contradictory ways we move through the world. Following the release of her debut album Long Long Gone, she quickly attracted the attention of French and international media including France Inter, RFI, France Culture, Télérama, FIP, and Rolling Stone.

Barbara has been writing songs since she was fourteen, when she first picked up a guitar and began turning her poems into lyrics. She still approaches songwriting from the written word, often writing her lyrics separately before finding the chords that will carry them. As a teenager, she filled journals every day, using writing as a way of trying to understand what she was feeling and what was happening around her. For Barbara, writing has always been less about creating a polished version of herself than about getting closer to the truth, Even when that truth is uncomfortable, contradictory, or difficult to name.

Barbara grew up in New York and is drawn to cities, to the endless stream of lives unfolding around her. She often finds herself sitting alone in cafés, watching the world go by, listening to fragments of conversations and studying the people around her. She needs the energy of a city to feel fully alive and to have movement, tension, noise, encounters to write. She likes taking the subway without necessarily having anywhere urgent to be, watching faces appear and disappear between stations and wondering about the stories behind them. What interests her is the complexity written onto people’s faces: a moment of joy beside one of sadness, confidence masking fear, tenderness existing alongside anger. She observes people almost as a way of trying to understand them, and in doing so, to understand herself.

Barbara grew up listening to artists such as Bob Dylan, Sixto Rodriguez, Tom Waits, Barry White, and Al Green, before finding her own inspiration through artists like Cat Power, Feist, Kurt Vile… She first stepped onto a stage at just nine years old, performing at Rockwood Music Hall in New York City. Overwhelmed by the experience at the time, she nevertheless discovered something lasting in the act of being heard- the particular emotion and vulnerability of standing in front of other people and allowing them into your world. She continued performing, moving from intimate rooms to larger stages including Le Cabaret Sauvage. More recently, she toured with Herman Dune and will open for Dylan LeBlanc during his European tour this winter.

For Barbara, performing is another form of exposure. The stage creates a space of extreme vulnerability, but one that has become strangely familiar. She is drawn to deliberately putting herself in uncomfortable situations, almost as a challenge: confronting the things that frighten her rather than trying to avoid them. That impulse runs through her life and her writing. She is interested in what happens when we stop trying to present ourselves as coherent and instead allow ourselves to exist in all our contradictions.

Now based in Paris, Barbara records from her home studio, where she favors spontaneity and instinct over excessive polish. Her new album, Beat Out The Sun, was recorded in April 2026. The title comes from a work by American artist Dana Schutz, whom Barbara greatly admires. For her, the phrase carries several meanings: pushing against her own limits, confronting her fears, embracing her identity, and slowly feeling herself grow. It suggests the struggle to move toward the light without pretending that the darkness was never there.

The album emerged from an especially turbulent period in Barbara’s life. Last winter, she witnessed a serious accident involving people close to her, an experience that profoundly unsettled her and forced her to reconsider many of the relationships around her. In the aftermath, friendships, intimacy, empathy, and the ways people respond to suffering became central questions. She found herself confronted with the fact that people can react to the same tragedy in radically different ways: some instinctively move toward others with generosity and care, while others seem unable or unwilling to feel anything. The accident made her question not only the people around her, but also her own reactions.

Beat Out The Sun comes from that place of uncertainty. Rather than trying to explain emotions away or turn them into simple narratives, Barbara allows herself to sit inside them. The songs explore the strange experience of being confronted with someone you thought you knew and suddenly seeing them differently; of being surprised by your own capacity for anger, tenderness, fear, love, or detachment.  She writes about the uncomfortable spaces between opposing feelings – when you can love someone and resent them, feel devastated and strangely alive at the same time, want to leave and desperately want to stay.

There are high highs and very low lows in Barbara’s emotional landscape, and she does not shy away from either. Her songs are an attempt to move through those extremes rather than smooth them over. She writes about embracing fear instead of hiding from it, accepting the less flattering or more contradictory parts of her identity, and finding beauty in moments that are otherwise difficult to bear. Even profound sadness can contain tenderness; even a painful confrontation can reveal something unexpectedly beautiful.

In that sense, Beat Out The Sun is not simply an album about a difficult period. It is an album about learning to look, really look, at what happens to us and at the people we become in response, about change, growing up, and finding beauty in simple things. Like Barbara sitting in a café or watching strangers pass through a subway, the songs linger on small gestures, fleeting expressions, and emotional contradictions. They ask what lies beneath the surface, what we owe one another, and what it means to keep moving forward when we don’t yet have all the answers.

Beat Out The Sun will be released via Street Mission Records on January 29, with Barbara performing at Hasard Ludique in Paris on February 25.